- Before the arrival of European colonizers, rural societies in the Amazon Basin domesticated plants and developed agricultural practices and infrastructure which provided supplies of food and fiber and improved crop yields.
- As missionaries and the expansion of trade brought pathogens into communities which lacked immunity, the number of Indigenous people across the Amazon dropped drastically in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from an estimated 4 to 15 million people to about 400,000.
- In Brazil, a population census in the early 1990s showed an increase of Indigenous population, indicating higher birth rates and increased Indigenous self-identification. Boosting the latter across the Amazon Basin requires policies that prioritize the formalization of land rights of communities with specific ethnic heritage.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Amazonian lowlands were home to several hundred ethnic groups living in tens of thousands of villages with a population estimated at between four and fifteen million inhabitants. Over millennia, these societies transformed landscapes along the main stem of the Amazon River and its major southern tributaries by developing agricultural practices that created dark earth soils, a technology that improved the physical and chemical properties of tropical soils, increased their productivity and ensured their sustainable use over centuries.
These rural societies for the most part lacked large urban centers, but were sufficiently sophisticated to domesticate dozens of plant species and manipulate natural populations in native forests to create managed groves dominated by species that provided food and fiber. Simultaneously, cultures occupying the seasonal forest and savanna regions on the southern rim of the Amazon engineered landscapes by building mounds, causeways and ditch systems that improved crop yields while creating logistical systems that supported even denser populations.
Tragically, all of these societies collapsed in the fifteenth and sixteenth and centuries, when epidemics caused by pathogens introduced during the Colombian Exchange burned through their communities. Although archaeology has yet to discover all the gruesome details, these societies were particularly susceptible to pandemics because of their relatively high population density and a trade network that promoted cultural interactions. The population is believed to have fallen to fewer than 400,000 individuals in a cataclysmic demographic collapse.
The number of ethnic groups that existed before the ‘Great Dying’ is unknown, but remnant populations were largely isolated from one another, giving rise to the long-held perception that the Amazon Forest was a pristine wilderness. The transition to a sparsely populated forest wilderness provided the widely dispersed groups with immunological protection because of their isolation from one another and the European colonizers. Over the next two centuries, the population continued to decline because of interventions by missionaries and colonial agents who reintroduced pathogens to populations that had yet to acquire immunological defenses.
The rubber boom of the late nineteenth century led to another round of decimation, as Indigenous communities were enslaved, displaced or massacred. Most survived as ethnic entities by fleeing deeper into the forest, occupying forest landscapes along tertiary tributaries or remote valleys in the Andean foothills and Guiana highlands. Anthropologists estimate that Amazonian Brazil had a population of only about 100,000 Indigenous people in the mid-1970s.
The Brazilian census bureau started collecting data on individual ethnic groups in 1991, and that initial survey suggested their numbers had increased by 50%, a trend confirmed by the next census, with an additional increase of 72%. The upsurge reflected high birth rates and an increase in their enumeration catalyzed by the emergent Indigenous movement (see Chapter 11). Not only were individuals motivated to self-identify as Indigenous, but more remote villages were put on the map by the Brazilian state as it created new Indigenous territories. If growth rates remain the same (around 6% annually), the 2022 census should show a total Indigenous population in excess of 700,000.
Similar demographic rebounds have occurred in the other countries where incentives to claim an Indigenous identity have motivated communities to assert or recover their cultural heritage. Unfortunately, there are also social forces that cause some individuals to abandon their ethnic identity, particularly within urban populations that experience discrimination or racial animus. In Bolivia, for example, individuals often identify by regional affiliation rather than ethnic background; both are affected by a highly polarized political environment.
Key to the demographic revival has been the implementation of policies that prioritize the formalization of land rights of communities with specific ethnic heritage. Ribeirinha / Ribereña communities with obvious Indigenous roots are aware of the legal advantages of having an ethnic identity. This has motivated communities across the basin to rediscover their Indigenous heritage.
The trend to increased self-identification is an ongoing process along various stretches of the main stem of the Amazon River, particularly near the junction of the Marañon and Ucayali (Kukama, Yagua), the Solimões (Tikuna, Miranha, Kukama, Kambeba/Omagua), middle Amazon (Mura), and the near the mouth of the Tapajós (Arapium, Borari, Mawé).
The demographic recovery the Amazon’s Indigenous cultures must be evaluated, however, in the context of the non-ethnic population, which is the product of 400 years of migration and the subsequent social fusion caused by intermarriage.
Banner Image: The Ribeirinho communities, located on the main course of the Amazon and Solimões rivers between Iquitos and Belém, can trace their demographic history back to the ethnic groups that inhabited the river and its tributaries before the arrival of European missionaries, as well as traders, soldiers, adventurers, rubber tappers, and runaway slaves who migrated to the floodplain over the past four centuries. Credit: © PARALAXIS / Shutterstock. / Shutterstock.
“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).
To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, Chapter Three here, Chapter Four here and Chapter Five here.
Chapter 6. Culture and demographic defines the present